


Never Assume That You'll Remember It Tomorrow Morning

by experimentaldrama



Category: Gintama
Genre: F/F, Gekijouban Gintama Kanketsu-hen: Yorozuya yo Eien Nare | Be Forever Yorozuya, Killer Dynamics and Sad Surroundings, Separated Family, Sickness, Swearing, gintama secret santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 15:06:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8991733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/experimentaldrama/pseuds/experimentaldrama
Summary: “Do you think that this is what it was like for him,” Kagura whispers suddenly. “Back then. With everyone dropping around you like flies. And everything you know is suddenly upside-down.”
(My Secret Santa gift for @shimurass on twitter! Merry Christmas.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Really, really thanks to @GntmSecretSanta for hosting this on twitter, it was loads of fun. Merry Christmas to Meg, I hope you enjoy this?

“The moon.” Sacchan giggles, off-pitched. “The moon. I’d never really thought of it that way, you know? Your name means the moon. That’s such a cliché, just like you.” She began to laugh again, much unrestrictedly.

“Sarutobi. . .” Tsukuyo fiddles with her hands awkwardly, and Sacchan is too soon to be cautious, in how _strange as hell it is_ for her. -- Sacchan _also_ couldn’t remember the last time she had changed and washed her own outfit. Then the dirt and soot stains nearly made her fidget, and she can't imagine why. She knew, with a touch of personal valiance, there was no one at all to impress.

A guarded parade of soldiers with paling heads and drowning throats were overseeing this spectacle. Sacchan and Tsukuyo stood just at the corner of the street, watching the black caskets bounce up and down on their merry ways. The caskets were being towed in an uneven line, their two vehicles sputtering gas, as if in pain, and alone in the streets, and would be even if the so-called Bafuku hadn’t closed them off. Like Tsukuyo had offered awkwardly earlier, that she’d thought the Shogunate was just trying to reinforce the deceased’s dignity, despite the fact that they’d died cramped, ten patients sharing a room meant for one, too weak and forgetting to even say their last goodbyes to loved ones. The exhaust of the machine on the right coughed again.

They were in the air as well, in new-age monkey blimps that had giant electronic screens on the side celebrating the faces of the deceased, and it would just as well if they’d been screaming, like a four-year-old. It was as grand a celebration as any, maybe one that would follow a particularly fast-paced sports game, but instead of resting laurels on the victorious, it was for the dead. Sacchan revised this as she went—she guessed the dead _were_ considered the victorious. And the amiable streets, new and shiny but patched and well-loved, didn’t seem nearly as nice without the people on them.

“I guess if you’re the moon,” Sacchan continues loudly, her voice not only never cracking but also _more_ boisterous than normal, and if that’s not a damn accomplishment she doesn’t know what is. “I’d be Gin-san’s sun, right?”

“You’ve been reading too many romance novels, Sarutobi.”

“You would know, huh?”

Tsukuyo rolls her eyes a bit. “What would you know?”

“I kno-ow,” Sacchan pauses, “I know that you don’t know how to have fun! Except when you hit the bottle.”

At last the procession-- which was _almost_ too frivolous for a funeral entirely, with balloons and everything-- had its tail start to advance away from them. _Choo choo._ They might’ve had any complaint if not for the fact that Shigeshige had been one of the first taken. The funeral had been grand.

Now it was completely silent, only with the clatter as a soldier drops a walkie-talkie device, with its mellow sister phone still sending its filler over, over, roger. Sacchan’s words sound like a warbler bird’s call, squealing and scattering in the street.

She feels much too small, much too tiny and useless to fill the sound-void that was left throughout Edo. It’s like getting your braces off when you were thirteen; you’d pray and pray and pray for the darn metal to come off, it was annoying and worthless, you would whine, just like the rowdy Edoites had always done. Then the day came when the dentist takes them off and you ran your tongue over your teeth over and over expecting to be cut by those sharp bits poking out, even hoping. Every time feel your teeth, the absence was surprising.

Sacchan recalls finally how she had never ever been good at those analogies.

Feeling uselessness, though, isn’t a feeling she intends to let live, she’d crack down on it, much like she had cracked down on any doubt of them being able to fix the world.

Today, Gin-san’s face isn’t on the screens, either.

The next day the terminal was bombed, a huge bite taken right off the top, a special effect not even Jaws could match in authenticity. But everyone who could afford to flee had already fled. The blimp today blows up their faces-- though not as rewards, as the prisoners they already were. Each of their heads were that pale grey, accommodated by their personal little cell numbers dancing about the bottom of the screen. A few months ago it would be considered unprofessional, and impromptu, the way the prison ward had only snapped their picture as they were, no backdrop, a strange angle to the cell bars’ shadows behind them.  Their execution date for the treason they’d committed goes unmentioned—they were the dead walking. Or, Tsukuyo thinks, maybe there’s just no more executioners. No more teachers, or snobby computer engineers, or ambassadors from strange planets, or men spending their last on another drink, or sanitation engineers.

“They probably thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime,” Tsukuyo says. “Everything goes to hell and suddenly people are around, taking. . . dumps on statues of Buddha.”

Sacchan frowns at her. “Hell? Dumps? Are you some kind of street-urchin now? Bitch, that’s my role.” Her voice goes dry.

There is an air compression as the blimp touched ground. It would not go to fly again, but no one would stand outside to watch their programs anyhow. There’s not been a delusion of a cure, Sacchan thinks -- not even the brief interlude of peace and semi-panic Sacchan had observed in corny science fiction drama when the government promised restructure, rehabilitation. But their own government _had_ at least lowered their heads in grief. Then they’d died.

From the start, as if it was a common cold, many ladies and men and everyone else had just strapped goddamn masks over their faces and returned to their works.  Now all you could ever hear were silent voices, silent voices and some coughing, maybe.

If they weren’t having spasms on the tile of their bathroom or choking up mucus, they were too scared to leave their houses. Tsukuyo knows, because they together had gone up and down and up and down every street -- like amnesiacs that lost their ways and walk to the same house every day expecting a long-dead son to be fixing family dinner inside -- and the only people that they had seen were a few balding thugs with cranky attitudes. She hardly ever sees Edo, so it was never as if many of these places had fond memories underlying, but this was t _heirs_ , something that they were supposed to be granted.

“Being surrounded by vulgar mouths my entire life, I never felt the need.” She looks down. Sacchan notices that sometimes, when she felt like she was alone, she would clutch at her pants like a princess hitching her dress.

Sacchan licks her lips; she’d lost her chap stick weeks ago when there were first the stampedes of panic, get-get-get out before you die-die-die, and it was a strange thing to be so aware of a little inconvenience, but she just couldn’t get it out of her head. “And now?” When Tsukuyo doesn’t make a sound, she continues, “Yoshiwara still the sex capital of Edo? Still luring in those hideous-but-desperate wealthy men for outrageous prices?”

“. . .More of a jail cell.” She raises her hand, and for a demented moment Sacchan is sure that it is to wipe her face, streaming with tears, but Tsukuyo’s eyes are dry. It’s to crack her knuckles, and they pop one after another. Sarutobi winces, reminded immaturely of once a few years ago, that few months when she’d come down with pneumonia, when the doctor had prescribed her two pills a day, when she had reluctantly stuck as many as ten sticky-notes in her closet to promise to herself that she’d remember. . .

But she loathed the sound of cracking open the pillbox. Though she hadn’t _died_ , even after missing it once or twice or five times. She bets if the ones with the plague could have had pillboxes that made obnoxious noises, they’d have taken them right on the dot, seven-oh-oh, for months, for years, but no no, they only fell, splat, face plant on the asphalt. Then after a few hours, moving them and their stiffed limbs was like moving waterlogged… well, logs.  

“Seita and Hinowa are gone. I got everyone on the first ship out. We have no money shortage. There’s nothing, uh, there for me. Besides, there seems to be a lot of… vacancy in the city, recently. Maybe I’ll— “She blinked a long second— “I’ll finally see what it’s like to live in Edo.”

“Do you need a place?” Sacchan blurts. She can’t know why; as Tsukuyo has always been her rival, a rival in _love_ – she nearly swoons even at the notion. Sacchan briefly has a thought… that maybe with the stones crashing through all our windows to loot the deceased (though money surely has no value), and the peeking eyes through blinds to see if _maybe_ a miracle had occurred (none had) – so that the confident would swagger again, the children would play, and the couples would dally with their hands entwined -- _maybe_ it was time to look past that. Particularly, at Tsukuyo. She dismisses this all-too-rational thought. _We can change the ending,_ she recites. _We can change the ending_ , again.

“You know, it’s the first time since they arrived that Christmas lights haven’t been fuckin’ hung all over the square here, Tsukki,” Sacchan mulls that night. “I used to find it _so_ annoying. Now I think I’d like to open the curtains and be blinded by neon greens and reds.”

No streetlights were lit, either. No maintenance workers had come to change the bulbs. No jingle bell rock.

Tsukuyo nods thoughtfully, like she’s archiving the sentiment. She had the sort of eyes that betrayed when she was being a plain people-pleaser, as opposed to when she took your words seriously. She’d also changed into a pair of wrinkled blue-silk pajamas that Sarutobi owns. “You could live anywhere in Edo you’d like. Why do you keep your old apartment?”

Sarutobi wastes no time. “Well. There is this one a _sshole_ that lives above me—this lecher guy with huge boobs of his own, it’s a wonder he even needs help to, you know. Clomps around up there, and then yells at me for being too loud! As if playing back the Gintama CDs and taking pictures of Gin-san’s face for my phone is louder than your pleasures, you _jerk_!” She aimed the last bit at the ceiling, as if he was still in residence.

Tsukuyo laughs a big bellylaugh, and is surprised that the feeling could make you feel better, as if raising your chin and feeling the sound travel from your stomach to your mouth and back just triggers the right hormones to trick you into everything’s-okay mode.

“Hell, I bet they already scattered your ashes. . .” By the end of the breath, her large voice is small again, like a child’s.

By the end of the month, her apartment is ransacked, clothes taken – the pajamas Tsukuyo had first borrowed – little knickknacks, for whatever reason, food that was stored, all gone. The next place they take residence in, they both help take the painstaking measures to booby-trap the entrances, nearly standing back to back with no, both wondering in their own minds, if battles were all they knew. The apartment is larger, but it’s a place Gintoki probably never stepped foot in, and separation goes unmentioned.

They always found distractors—mostly it was scaling the city, the city in which they became reluctant sort of overlords. They didn’t mean anything by it—it was only that none would ever come even close to beating their kunai on their own, and if they were together, boy, they wouldn’t stop their stride for less than a hundred strong. It was not very miraculous when the streets began to collect dust, making it a perfect left-for-dead studio set. Sacchan boasted that it made her _already badass_ entrances even better. Tsukuyo wonders aloud if we’re counting your _badassery_ with or without your glasses.

The thing that bothered Sacchan most was that after a while, Tsukuyo wouldn’t wipe the dirt off of her cheeks.

Sacchan was no hygienist. But Tsukuyo had never, in the years that they’d known each other, been able to stand grime and dust _anywhere_ , from the soles of her shoes to the air-pockets between her fingernails and skin. Sacchan would scoff when the lady always played the prick to swathe patiently in and out of every wrinkle and every scar. Sacchan had poked fun at her sheltered upbringing so much that she’d sure brag about it.

One day Sacchan found herself looking in the mirror, nearly too clouded with dust to have her reflection anymore. It might’ve been for the better-- Sacchan didn’t care to see the dulled cornered-animal panic in her eyes every morning. She pulls off her gloves, starting from the tips of her fingers, and grabs a towel from the far rack, wobbling with the over-extension and nearly falling.

They hoard as much water as they could find. They were fit enough still to carry several gallons at a time, so the bathroom was filled with barrels covered and tied, all for drinking except for one marked in hand-script by Tsukuyo, “washing”.

Sacchan pulls the rubber cover off with little resistance, dips the towel in, and squeezes it out, the water coming in rivulets. She’d never been good at housework. She uses an elbow to push up her glasses, and a rumbling causes a jar on the edge of the sink to fall off. Sacchan catches it precariously with the flat of her toe.

The concrete walls with no ventilation made it absurdly hot in the summertime. But as it turned out, it was still better than abandoned streets and their complementary toppled streetlights and smashed roads.

Earlier in the day, they’d watched, horrified, as a man convulsed on the pavement. His hair was white—whiter than it should be from age, bleached, no chance it was human’s, it must be string, string, it had to be _string_ – and he kept calling out, screaming, he wasn’t sick, he was as lively as ever, he was one of the lucky ones. . . _what a catastrophe_.

Tsukuyo had vomited in an alleyway afterwards. Sarutobi rubbed her back regretfully. Afterwards, her legs straightened and she pulled her own way up, despite Sacchan’s calling, and didn’t bother to wipe the saliva from her lips. Later they’d traveled to the docks and found dozens of sea crabs, egrets, and pochards just keeled over, scattered all around. The untended ships were still tethered to their poles, but it seemed some kind of insect or rodent had been having a meal of the sails.

“I guess it isn’t a good idea to send people anyways… In case the other parts of the world aren’t affected yet.” Tsukuyo was again thinking of the big picture. Sacchan was again thinking about keeping Tsukuyo alive, keeping her friends alive. And reviving one old.

Now Sacchan cleans the dust and spit from her face, scrubs it so that Tsukuyo complains and it was a throbbing red afterwards. “You’ll be fucking clean, Tsukki,” she says, ushering her into the shower, where they dip into their water preserves for it. It didn’t look as if there’d be much competition for the liquid. Oh well. Afterward, Tsukuyo brushes the full length of Sacchan’s hair through, so they’d be even, she claims. Sacchan squeals at every tangle, cursing Tsukki for ruining her prospects.

At one point, Tsukuyo begins to hum sweetly, a lullaby. “I didn’t know you could sing,” Sacchan says, in a little admiration. Tsukuyo’s eyes go dark, and she falters. Sacchan grudgingly has to ask her to resume. Her words are slush, so Sacchan can only make out the plot vaguely—God and his angels, tradition, tradition, burning lights.

“It’s never really how they iterate it. . . in the action movies,” Sacchan recalls afterward, feeling more than a little sleepy from the combing. The two share a king-sized bed -- no point in one of them sleeping on the floor because the apartment only had one. Though, Sacchan was a messy sleeper type, and they usually woke intertwined. “It’s not like I think I’ll go to bed and everything will be back to normal. It’s like having a film over your eyes… all the time? I don’t really goddamn know, you’re the literature professor, after all.”

Tsukuyo isn’t expected to answer, and she doesn’t even acknowledge the jab. She says instead, ten minutes later, “I’d like to have gone to Africa.”

“What?” The word was drawn out, and exaggeratedly annoyed.

“I mean, somewhere in Africa. Burundi, Libya. I wanted to go when I was . . .younger. It was my personal pacifier.” Her face was surely burning, Sacchan knew, even if Sacchan’s sight was all but gone from lack of artificial light. Tsukuyo thinks that anyone could notice that when Sacchan ran out of things to say, she’d get louder and louder as if covering up her uncertainty.

That night, she feels Tsukuyo throw off the covers and get up. The door betrays her with a long-sounding creak.

They find Shinpachi-kun and Kagura-chan a while after. It was too mundane to see them on the balcony of the Yorozuya, especially when Sacchan and Tsukuyo had been over nearly every other day, checking under the couches like their former inhabitants might be playing a particularly advanced game of hide-n-go-seek. But after all that a house was still just a house.

Shinpachi wears a black tee and black jeans, almost like he was in mourning. He feels numb, except for a pain in his throat that made it difficult to form words, and behind his eyes that made him not want to look anywhere. The cause of it must’ve been a cold or something other, he’d long deducted. Kagura has a too-large shirt and baggy pants, and a spare yukuta of Gintoki’s is draped across her back like a baby’s blue blanket. They don’t bother to ask where their old gear had gone. Shinpachi insists that Gintoki is still alive before his sixth breath. Sacchan agrees. Tsukuyo doesn’t say a word, but she wishes for her pipe, that pipe which called for her composure and slowed her heartbeat, that pipe which unfortunately Sarutobi calls “just for the aesthetic”. But Tsukuyo does want for it.

“Do you think that this is what it was like for him,” Kagura whispers suddenly. “Back then. With everyone dropping around you like flies. And everything you know is suddenly upside-down.”

_The last time I heard her speak so quietly, it was of her discovery of why bagels taste so much better than toast, when they’re both breakfast breads,_ Sacchan thinks.

But Tsukuyo is the one who responds, ever the realist. “It was worse. We, we haven’t lost--” She breaks off. It is the first time Kagura has witnessed her stone expression break down, their own personal pull of gravitation too strong for Tsukuyo’s pointed frown to withstand, not anymore. “It was worse.”

Kagura says softly, “Oh.”

They don’t talk for long, because assuredly the only thing worth discussing was the one that no one could bear to ask. _What are we supposed to do from here?_

The next day, a fire catches in Kabuki, a little down from the Yorozuya house after Shinpachi and Kagura had already headed out, to a place they wouldn’t tell, much to Sacchan and Tsukuyo’s frustration. The little act of petty pyromania wouldn’t have mattered—the entire ordeal was more than common when straining conditions made everyone stir-crazy, except that Sacchan and Tsukuyo were still out on the streets, when everything bursts into flame.

Sarutobi catches the little shortie scurrying away, bent over so much that he resembled a rodent, with the greasy hair to match. She’s instantly convinced he must have ancestry even to the pure genus Rattus. “Motherfuck!” she yells, her language becoming more rancid by the day.

Tsukuyo comes to remember the worst thing about fires… the _smell_ , for all that the smoke choked the life-air out of you. The smell changed with every new thing the fire consumed, and most were not things intended to be timber. The result was an attack of the senses, biting your eyes, mouth and nose and fingers and toes. If anyone else was around to witness the arson, they didn’t make a sound, and so the roar of the flames was front and center, and for a moment it was all, it was everything. It was a bother to extinguish it. In between her eyes and whatever organ required her to process the scene, she feels the remnants of the last great fire she’d witnessed.

Sacchan is seething still, stomping around and muttering profanities.

Planks fall from an empty house that implodes in a burst, and the flame, like a little parasite, latches onto the strands of Tsukuyo’s hair. Sacchan gasps and panics, trying to extinguish it. The fire climbs up Tsukki’s shoulders, producing the most disgusting smell, a smell only dwarfed by the smell of humans decomposing. Sacchan practically jumps on her before the fire is forced to quit its track. The fire is much less scary than the blank expression on Tsukuyo’s face.

Tsukuyo only stands perfectly still, and shrugs, once the flame is out. Only momentarily trying to shake the crumbling bits of her fringe off of her scalp. “. . .It was getting too long for comfort anyhow,” she explains flatly.

“You’re. . . hopeless!” Sacchan says in spectacular fashion, fanning her face like a hopeless maiden. “Now how will Gin-san ever love you?”

“You’re right.” Tsukuyo begins to brush colorless ash and soot off of her shoulders, wincing when encountering still-lit embers. Sacchan can hear her heart in her ears, strangely, and it begins to decline its breakneck pace, but she still feels dangerously close to a palpable panic attack. Tsukuyo doesn’t outright laugh, but huffs in her signature _thank-you-but-I’m-a-stone-cold-bitch_ way. “I should get prepared for suitors. I’m certainly of age. I wonder where I could find a hairdresser around here…?”

The creak that the cabinet made when it swings open makes Sacchan jump, and a few flies buzz out—how they’d gotten in, she has no idea. She takes the pair of scissors, neat in its place on the knife rack, which is how you could tell they’d never been used by the two. The rest of the knives were scattered around the flat any which way.

“You certainly are well-trained, Sarutobi. Especially in makeup.” Tsukuyo exhales a breath, the type coming from your deep chest, with that toxic dioxide stashed in your lungs from the day swept out. When was the last time they had really, really slept?

“Making fun of me again, bitch?”

“Never.”

Her ability to sit so still really was overachieving, and Sacchan makes a point of that several times. Several times she also checks to see if Tsukuyo was still breathing, like an anemic infant newly carted down from a hospital, and sleeping too soundly in its crib.

When the sun was overhead and blinding, Sacchan would see flickers of Tsukki’s head and was sure, so _sure_ it was white, and her heart would nearly stop for a moment, before a different angle was taken and the hair revealed as just pale gold.

Sacchan takes her glove and wipes the mirror, but it only smears the grime its coated in. She digresses, leading Tsukuyo into the bathroom, swearing up and down, with expletives added like commas and colons, to not look until told. Tsukuyo complies, and she probably would even without the cursing, but Sacchan needs to be loud still, loud enough to fill the space in which only the clip-clip-clip occupies. There’s a scraggy knitting of branded skin just as her hairline ends, of which she’ll come to refuse treatment of, and of which Sarutobi will come to secretly salve in the dead of night.

“And . . . ta-da! Open your eyes!” She does. “You look so damn pretty in any hairstyle, it’s almost unfair.” Sacchan laughs like she’s hiding some sort of innate jealousy.

Tsukuyo stares blankly at the mirror, with a little swab of clarity allowing her to see herself newly groomed, and then turns to smile at Sacchan. It takes all of Sacchan to convince herself the smile was not out of only politeness. “Thank you, Sarutobi, it’s—“

And like she couldn’t bear it any longer, her legs buckle, her face crumples. Sacchan barely catches her, the motion was unfamiliar to that one, was it even her anymore? _Why the hell are you doing this?_ Sacchan wants to scream. I’m undeserving, undeserving to witness you so crudely.

Tsukuyo’s limbs are limp, like she still expects to hit the floor any minute, and Sarutobi struggles in compensating for the weight. “. . .What are we . . .supposed to do from here, Ayame?”

Sacchan lowers them to the floor, face still up in Tsukuyo’s new hair, pushing it up from her skull. And if Sacchan weren’t thinking about parading caskets around the town and vomiting in alleys and science-fiction novels, and particularly that the Christmas season was gone and passed for a second time since this all started and she still hadn’t gotten Gin-san that promiscuous toy she’d fantasized of the June “before”, and wondering vainly if she’d wasted time by propagating a romance they both knew was a joke – this gesture, it would’ve been like a kiss to the crown of Tsukuyo’s head.

Sacchan was not loud, she was not speaking at all, and she faced the quiet like it were a great water-gouged ravine. Then there was no rush, no grand realization of memories, other than that they were there, and always had been, and Edo was not, what a miracle, what a tragedy, what a comedy.

_I’m the same way_ , she thinks tiredly. She can’t comfort Tsukuyo. If only there were any voices, even whiny ones, even ludicrous ridiculous preposterous happy voices, voices that were alive, in a few mile’s radii, but their own. Sarutobi tries not to breathe in. _I’m the same way,_ she thinks again. Because Tsukuyo’s hair still smells just like the fire. _Life is like a soap bubble._ Sacchan finds a little consolation in that and also finds lots of self-disgust. She chooses the safer answer, which also happens to be the honest one, for once.

“I don’t know.”


End file.
